Surprises of the Palo Verde Tree
If you get a notion to saddle up and ride in the semi-desert areas of the American Southwest, you can expect to come across the palo verde tree. Keep an eye out for it the next time you watch a Western movie. It is a big shrub or small tree that folks use for landscaping and ornamentation. Some can get rather large, so there is quite a range in sizes. There are varieties of it in many parts of the world (and can be a nuisance if you ask people in the Land Down Under), and it is fond of having less water than most other trees and shrubs.
The palo verde has not had a great deal of study in the past, which is unfortunate. Most trees do their photosynthesis through the leaves, but this one uses the trunk, stems, and petioles (a petiole is the part that attaches the leaf to the stem). There is significant disagreement on genera and species. Some are green, some have different flowers than others, some are yellow, some are bluish — I reckon there's good reason for discussion on those things.
Particle-to-plant evolutionists are stumped (see what I did there?) to provide any plausible evidence or model of descent with modification. However, the adaptations present seem to indicate engineered adaptability, although this concept is not discussed in the article linked below. Our Creator designed the palo verde to thrive in conditions that most other plants would shun, and analysis supports this view. Although the following article is rather technical, if I could get something out of it, I think you can, too. I read some parts of it quickly.
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| Credit: Flickr / Larry & Teddy Page (CC BY 2.0) |
Particle-to-plant evolutionists are stumped (see what I did there?) to provide any plausible evidence or model of descent with modification. However, the adaptations present seem to indicate engineered adaptability, although this concept is not discussed in the article linked below. Our Creator designed the palo verde to thrive in conditions that most other plants would shun, and analysis supports this view. Although the following article is rather technical, if I could get something out of it, I think you can, too. I read some parts of it quickly.
The palo verde tree, Parkinsonia spp., is well known to residents of the desert southwest and Mexico, yet there are few studies of it in the technical literature. As a drought-resistant, woody plant, it is unique in several ways, most notably its bright green trunk, stems, and petioles where most photosynthesis is performed. Stem photosynthesis is, however, not unique to this desert plant. Other unusual features of the palo verde plant include extensive root systems, heavily cutinized epidermis and vascular bundles, sunken stoma, very small leaves (leaflets), drought-deciduous behavior, idioblasts, C4 photosynthesis, and the plentiful accumulation of storage products, oil, starch, and calcium oxalate. These features make this plant uniquely fitted to thrive in arid, desert biomes. More work is required to clearly isolate and describe such tissues as the cambium, primary and secondary phloem and xylem bundles, and the extent of internal cutinization of this unusual woody plant. We conclude that the sum of these unique features make it purposefully fitted to the biomes in which it grows.To read the rest of this admittedly challenging but also very interesting article, click on "A Light and Electron Microscopic Study of the Palo Verde Tree of the Desert Southwest".